Great Scott! You want how much?

I doubt that, when Captain Robert Falcon Scott (pictured left) was seeking sponsorship for the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910, any of the industrialists he approached said to him “Oh, so you’re doing it sponsored? Who for?” Today when I see on the BBC website that a group of celebrities are seeking sponsorship for their assault on Mount Kilimanjaro, I suspect that the meaning of the word ‘sponsorship’ has significantly changed over the past 100 years.

Of course, the sponsorship that goes on nowadays is so much more worthwhile – it provides income for that multi-million pound industry called “charity”; it gives the BBC and ITV something to film; and it makes a lot of fund-raisers feel good about themselves. I daresay it even sometimes helps homeless kids and starving Africans and the like, but these are, naturally, of lesser concern. From the BBC website it is clear that the main focus of the event is not the malaria bed nets (don't get me started on those) for Tanzanian tots, but the sheer celebrity of those grizzled adventurers Chris Moyles, Ronan Keating, and Denise Van Outen. Not having the Edwardian equivalents of these aboard the Terra Nova when it set sail was, I suppose, Captain Scott’s first and costliest mistake.

I don’t object to fund-raising; I don’t object to helping other people (whether or not they are ‘less fortunate’ than I); I don’t even object to people entering fun runs, walking the Great Wall of China or having their heads shaved. But put all this together into a filmed (and doubtless podcast) charity event and it all becomes so bloody objectionable.

Lately a new – and particularly morbid – ingredient has been added to this mix: doing it ‘in memory’ (why not ‘in remembrance’?) of someone. Every year thousands of women throughout the UK ‘race’ a distance of 5km, few of them gunning for Tirunesh Dibaba's 14:11.15 world record, but most of them wearing a picture of a dead person on their T-shirt. This is the women-only ‘Race for Life’ organised by Cancer Research UK. Now, I wouldn’t knock cancer research – more money should be poured into this. But I would knock Cancer Research for the way the whole Race for Life has been promoted. The aim seems not to be the raising of funds so that more scientists can peer through more microscopes at more cells; the aim is to get women to take part in a shared experience of grief. But grief won’t cure cancer.

The event-sponsorship-celebrity-grief cocktail is mixed in bad taste, and it fuzzes the focus that we once had on what we consider worthwhile human achievements. The meaning of sponsorship needs to be reclaimed as the provision of cash that enables any of these worthwhile human achievements to be undertaken. If you want to be charitable, then help someone you know (charity does begin at home), or just make a straightforward donation yourself, but don't go asking me for 'sponsorship'. We need to sponsor genuine exploration, whether this be of Mount Kilimanjaro, the South Pole or of the nuclei of human cells.